Holding the Pass to Paradise

V. S. Naipaul’s Nobel Prize for Literature was announced on 11 October 2001, exactly a month after Muslim suicide pilots crashed hijacked airliners into the US Pentagon and World Trade Center. The next day, by chance, I saw a 20-year-old paperback copy of Among the Believers lying on the table outside our local secondhand bookshop.

Like everyone else, I had been shocked and baffled by the attacks on America. And although I had read a good deal of the torrent of punditry unleashed by the events of September 11, I was little closer to understanding them. Since I was in the middle of writing a book about the Muslim Uighurs of China, I snatched the paperback up. How, everyone was asking, could young men intelligent enough to seize and pilot large aircraft be stupid enough to fly them into skyscrapers? How could they hate us so much? The bizarre mentality of suicide bombers, a terrible parody of martyrdom, was inexplicable – until I read Naipaul’s book. Published in 1981, Among the Believers is the account of a journey through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia in 1979, shortly after the Iranian revolution. Its subject, the Muslim fundamentalist revival, was not yet much of an issue inside Britain. (Naipaul made the journey again in 1995 for a sequel, Beyond Belief, but this first encounter with Islam proved to be the more revealing.) I seem to recall there were protests when the book came out. Some Muslims thought a secular Hindu from Trinidad had no business writing about Islam. I was predisposed to trust Naipaul, however, having enjoyed A House for Mr Biswas and other earlier books of his. Also, the sensitivity of his subject was familiar to me. I had myself interviewed prominent British Muslims and had done the rounds of mosques and schools in places like Manchester (where I was accompanied by a charming Asian Muslim policeman) for the purpose of newspaper articles. The protesters seriously misjudged Naipaul. Sceptical he might have been, but in this book he illuminated the inexplicable by not trying too hard to explain it. He did what a good reporter does in unfamiliar territory: he reported what he heard and described what he saw. His approach was at once simple and subtle; he set down not only the words but also the gestures, looks, blinks and hesitations of his interviewees – which are often more eloquent. Down went the impressions, good or bad, right or wrong, just as they occurred. Nor was he afraid to admit fallibility: in one case he went back to a story (about a religious school in Indonesia) to make sure he had not got the wrong end of the stick. Naipaul is generally sympathetic to his interlocutors, such as Behzad the communist student who guides him round Tehran, or Nusrat the nervous hardworking journalist on the Karachi Morning News. At other times you sense the irritation felt by the outsider facing a wall of incomprehension, the frustration of listening to incantatory speeches, slogans and evasions. In Kuala Lumpur a delegation from a commune arrives unexpectedly at the author’s hotel and finds him in his winceyette pyjamas. They tell him that Napoleon was too interested in ‘love’ to fight battles, that Tolstoy was a Jew and that the Jews had been turned into apes by God. In north-east Malaysia he is solemnly informed by a Muslim teacher that people are giving up novels and reading the Koran instead, because ‘it is more natural’. Even when it is not clear to the reader what is going on, Naipaul is never dull. His quest is lightened by wonderful descriptions of places, the details of daily life. Here is his picture of the camel-carts of Karachi:

The camels trotted with their long heads held high. Their flapping mouths and big, round, cleft feet, picked up clean, gave each camel a triumphant air, as of a smiling athlete perpetually breasting a tape.

A highlight of the book is the author’s visit to Qom, a university city older than Oxbridge, where 14,000 theology students flap through the streets in clerical gowns. There he meets the plump and jolly Sheikh Khalkhali, hanging judge of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution, who (according to his obituary early this year) had at least 8,000 political opponents summarily executed. Another is his excursion up the Kaghan valley in northern Pakistan, where he meets small, tough but dandified Afghan traders sitting like pashas in their tents with their wrinkled wives, beautiful daughters and prize goats. There are telling vignettes, like the story of the iconoclasts of Malaysia who had been told that thirty Hindu idols smashed earned a free pass to paradise. One can summarize the lessons that Naipaul draws from his interviews. Fundamentalism is a reaction to encirclement by Western civilization, which is seen as sick and decadent. Yet it is ambivalent. Muslims cheerfully snap up the products of Western technology: the American Phantom jets sold to the Shah are ‘Iranian’; Pakistan’s nuclear bomb is ‘Islamic’. The Pakistani zealot Maulana Maudoodi goes to heaven via a hospital in Boston. Good Muslims applaud the religious revolution, but some cannot wait to get out. For those who cannot make the jump, zealotry is a refuge from dislocation. The ‘new Islam’ sanctifies what Naipaul calls the sense of wrongness felt by people banished from their traditional way of life. It endorses their ‘rage about the loss of the old order’. In Kuala Lumpur he talks at length to the articulate Shafi, a 32-year-old who has failed in business and now works for an Islamic youth movement. Shafi hankers after the protective rules of his remote village, its thrift and community spirit. But he cannot go back to it. He is part of the world he now shuns. Shafi has visited the US where he has seen only sinfulness. He echoes the disillusionment felt by many young Westerners (is that why they convert to Islam?). The difference is that while they can mostly cope with their freedom, Shafi and his fellows cannot. Sex, of course, is a serious preoccupation. Peasants come to the lobby of the Karachi Intercontinental to gawp at the ‘traffic’ – Western women. The rich book rooms over the pool so they can stare at girls in bikinis. The veil, sequestration, forced marriages and polygamy are justified as ‘protection’ of women. They are anachronistic. But the Muslims’ difficulty with Western sexual freedom is not always hard to fathom. What are they to make of the fact that gross pornography is protected by the American constitution as ‘freedom of speech’? (Incidentally, it comes as a surprise to many Muslims to learn that Christians, too, have rules about sexual conduct.) Naipaul observes some striking psychological similarities between the hostile creeds of revolutionary Islam and revolutionary Communism. Both have an acute sense of social injustice; indeed they rely on the people’s sense of themselves as perpetual victims. They even have similar doctrines: a ‘new Muslim’ in Indonesia explained to Naipaul that all the land belongs to Allah and must be shared equally between his creatures. Both creeds are geared up to destroy institutions, but they lack blueprints for rebuilding them. Both subordinate history to theology. Both demand unity, discipline, blind obedience and unattainable human perfection. And there is the same pitiless streak. A Jakarta businessman opined that to set the country to rights a million or two Javanese – all those who had risen in the world – would need to be killed. Fundamentalism loves rulebooks. It shuns explanation and analysis. Muslim zealots see the sickness of the West, but not the sickness in their own countries. Abstraction trumps reality. A Penang university lecturer, asked for his reaction to bad news from Pakistan , replied: ‘We need our own news services’. If the educated can show such wilful ignorance, what hope is there for the children brought up as ‘new Muslims’? Naipaul sees revolutionary Islam leading to paralysis. Faith is held up as the answer not only to modern materialism, but also to poverty, failure and decline. Work and effort seem not to count. When things go wrong, it is because Islam has not truly been tried: the believers are not pure enough. Despair can turn to rage – against one’s country as much as the hated West – and a thirst for vengeance. Desperate people are dry tinder, only waiting for the spark that will ignite them. Large numbers of the nearly two million Muslims in Britain are unemployed, poor and subject to racial abuse. In their case the spark is provided by uneducated village mullahs from the subcontinent who (so Britain’s leading imam told me) are supported by Saudi money and have jumped the queue to enter Britain where – until recently – they we re free to preach vengeance from city pulpits. Most religions have their extremists: Christians who bomb abortion clinics, Jewish ultras who hold Israel’s government to ransom, Hindu nationalists, Sikh militants. And liberals of every faith seem to have more in common with each other than with their own fundamentalists. But all ideologies can be made appealing to fanatics – think of Nazism, Communism, or the animal rights movement. Now we can see that Among the Believers, Naipaul’s search for the roots of Muslim fanaticism, was a prophetic book. It shows how dangerously vulnerable are people thrown into the modern world with only a medieval theology to guide them.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 3 © Christian Tyler 2004